The journey’s in the detours and the details with The Smile’s Wall of Eyes
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
“I am gonna count to three / Keep this shit away from me”
If there’s anything that’s going to snap me to attention on an album, a weirdly perverse line tucked into a disparate setting will do it. And here, The Smile are only too happy to oblige.
For a second time, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood had teamed up with drummer Tom Skinner for another round with The Smile, resulting in Wall of Eyes. It does not feel tossed away or needlessly experimental, which is so often the purpose of the extra-curricular activities that musicians in other bands engage.
Instead, it’s at once relaxed and urgent, resulting in just a delightful dost of twisted reality, and the perfect introduction to this still-new year of 2024.
It opens with a bit of the bossanova beat that Yorke and Greenwood have utilized more often as the years combine on the title track, “Wall of Eyes.” But that’s just an opening salvo as the trio seem to revel in taking the listener on as many detours as possible inside of 45 minutes.
If the first album was born out of simply trying to remain productive during the pandemic (and was much more productive than anything I could’ve imagined accomplishing during that time), this second effort feels much less like a thought exercise and more like the product of a tight, seasoned unit. As much as Yorke and Greenwood are obviously steering the ship here, they’ve found a much more stable space in which to stretch those muscles this time around.
Yorke still has a knack for delivering the most perplexing lines against seemingly incompatible backing, as on “Read the Room” where he repeats, in a nursery rhyme-type cadence, those cutting words quoted above:
“I am gonna count to three / Keep this shit away from me”
Later, on “Under Our Pillows,” he’s back with more disparate couplings as the music deteriorates beneath his feet:
“Episodes wiped clean, wiped clean, wiped clean /
This is major league, make believe, make believe...”
Later, Yorke lets go of the wheel, giving way to stress-inducing string swells towards the coda of “Bending Hectic,” which come crashing down into fuzzed-out bass and thundering drums, instruments and eras clashing in a confined space. It’s all so specific, it could have only come from Greenwood’s maniacal, musical brain.
I’m hesitant to keep calling out specific songs and lines here, though, because like the best of Yorke’s work, the eight songs on Wall of Eyes play as a piece, merging together, yielding and surging as needed to create shifting moods and a sense of place. I feel it’s an accomplishment to get this far without referencing Yorke and Greenwood’s other band, but the combination of “Bending Hectic” with the muted, swirling “You Know Me!” finale recall the dynamics at play in A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead’s 2016 (and most recent) album. Again, strings collide with piano and mechanized percussion to keep the listener just the right state of unsettled. But it’s all grounded in Yorke’s near-angelic delivery.
And in the final sign of a great album, the overwhelming urge is to go right back to the top and start again. Every listen reveals new nuances. Lines and textures emerge from the landscape. This will be a rewarding experience for months, at the least.
So, to begin 2024, we have our first ticket, where the destination still isn’t quite known. Wall of Eyes is not a side project, or an exercise. It’s a journey. And we’ve been invited to tag along for the ride.
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com